Byting the Hand That Feeds Them

...But even if you haven’t the slightest interest in seeing the assets Drexel Burnham still controls, don’t kid yourself...

...Citizen access to information and a diversity of information sources are the foundation of U.S...

...After carrying it for a week, CIDS purges the State Department daily press briefing, which is no longer available on paper...

...But public, schmublic...

...Vendors are not required to keep backlogs of the information they buy and sell...

...Users would pay telecommunications charges and a modest on-line charge...

...debt ($3.233 trillion as of July 9), as well as figures on how much the federal government has spent to date on food stamps, Medicare, and other social programs...

...Department of Agriculture (USDA...

...Byting the Hand That Feeds Them Information vendors are robbing the government blind by Daniel Gross You’re the typical South Florida pensioner: You have both a heart condition and an inexhaustible interest in the weather...

...The $20,000 question Since public information serves as the fuel for many vendors’ money-making machines, the Information Industry Association (IIA), a heavy-hitting Washington lobby, works vigilantly to ensure the uninterrupted flow of cheap government raw material to its 800 member firms and organizations...

...Over the next several years, the SEC will pay Mead nearly $2 million annually for the privilege of searching and retrieving information the SEC collects...

...Individuals unable to travel to the information hubs can gain access to EDGAR only through private vendors...

...But these are the great exceptions...

...There’s also a Gulf Reconstruction Commercial Information file-a referral service that describes ongoing United States efforts in Kuwait, offers advice on how to travel there, and provides phone numbers, addresses, and names of helpful contacts...

...The IIA casts itself as a stalwart guardian of the public’s right to know...

...As a result, the American public often pays twice for government data: once for an agency to collect the figures, the second time for the privilege of perusing it-that is, if they can afford it...

...We have the know-how...

...Since the State Department puts information into CIDS at taxpayer expense, Martin Marietta neither pays for its raw material nor adds value to the information...

...Mead Data Central, which runs LEXIWNEXIS, tallied revenues of $31 million in 1980...

...Of these, half were news services like Knight-Ridder...

...Currently, about one fifth of the 4,000-odd electronic databases available to computer operators consist of repackaged federal data...

...Even in the logy federal government, information once stowed in binders and gunmetal files is now neatly ensconced on computer diskettes, magnetic tapes, and CD-ROMs-compact discs, read by a laser beam, that contain words and numbers, not songs...

...Indeed, it shouldn’t...

...Mead then collects hundreds of times, by charging $39 per hour, plus a per-search charge (ranging from $3 to $50), plus a 2 cents per line charge for data lifted from Dispatch...

...And at minimum cost,” says IIA Senior Vice President Ken Allen...

...Where there is not a marketplace value yet there is a public need, we certainly think the government should move in and offer the services,” says Allen...

...But advanced technology makes services like the EBB and the proposed GPO Window eminently feasible and affordable...

...Marietta reaps further profits by selling the information to other vendors...

...Most of that money would go for some relatively uncomplicated hardware, which would allow an outsider to gain access to all the existing databases...

...It’s wet...

...The construction of the Window would take only a small federal investment-no more than a few million dollars...

...For years, lawyers have had a choice between the federal government’s low-cost texts of Supreme Court decisions and a more sophisticated, annotated version put out...

...Maybe you don‘t care that a few small Nebraska bean farmers are planting blind...

...Another industry agitprop warns darkly against “monopoly control over information held by a government entity...

...Some material carried on CIDS no longer appears in any department periodical...

...And yet Marietta charges high prices for access...

...Grace & Co., and Quaker Oats...

...Hutton, W.R...

...You simply have to locate the paragons of electronic access in the United States government-agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health, and a few branches of the Department of Commerce-where privatization is still a foreign word...

...supplier of portable well-drilling equipment...

...But not all of it has to be added to the Window immediately...

...And regardless of its format, it should be available, and usable, to both vendors and consumers at the price it costs the government to copy and deliver the information...

...2772 directs the GPO to set up a single point of online public access to a wide range of electronic federal databases...

...Once fully operative, the system, designed and run by Mead Data Central, will be used only by SEC staffers and by researchers at the nation’s three SEC public information rooms, which are located in Washington, Chicago, and New York...

...Believe it or not, today, when the National Weather Service wants access to some of its own data and records, it must pay the multimillion-dollar private corporations that own it...

...A- 130 explicitly prohibits agencies from undercutting private enterprise by duplicating systems already available from the private sector...

...You’re paying for the lack of access anyway...

...The revenues would cover the GPO’s costs for hardware, software, support staff, documentation, updating, and training...

...The GPO Window-a one-stop discount shopping center for public informationwould be accessible to private vendors as well...

...through a diversity of sources at a minimal cost...

...In fact, that’s what I’ve done in this article...

...But now the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), the Commerce Department branch that disseminates electronic information, charges $500 per tape...

...Govemment has a responsibility to preserve data,” says Ronald Plesser, IIA’s outside counsel...

...So under the terms of the SEC-Marietta contract, the government will never own a copy of the database in a useful format...

...Whatever the government has should be available to everybody on equal terms...

...Of course, the information industry isn’t too worried that few ordinary citizens can afford its services...

...This market’s invisible hand tends to prefer a select group of major corporations to tens of millions of curious citizens...

...It’s so hot, you complain to yourself, thinking nervously about the old ticker...

...In 1985, the OMB issued Circular A-130, which became the information industry’s Ur-text...

...The EBB contains files of recent National Science Foundation press releases, a list of Government Printing Office (GPO) publications, the schedule of Bureau of Economic Analysis release dates, and much, much more...

...For example, Mead Data Central pays the monthly minimum ($75), connects to CIDS for a few minutes each week, and pays the 2 cents per line charge when it converts Dispatch to the LEXIS system...

...I did one search to show some newspeople how it works,” says Nancy Kranich, a New York University librarian and chair of the American Library Association’s Coalition on Government Information...

...But in 1985, the USDA effectively granted a monopoly on the database’s distribution rights to one of America’s biggest info-corporations, Martin Marietta Data Systems...

...It’s gone private...

...NTIS has only 60 subscribers, most of which are large financial institutions and commercial vendors...

...Jump in...

...Reports, to name a few...

...McGraw Hill’s Data Resources Inc...

...A habitual user can open an account for $35...

...IIA literature is full of similarly uplifting egalitarian rhetoric...

...Disclosure, a commercial vendor currently under contract with the SEC, receives the SEC data on paper for free, types it into a computer, and then charges its users $45 per hour, plus $20 for each record accessed...

...Come back into the weatherman’s hot tub...

...Agencies would still maintain their own databases, while the GPO would bear primary responsibility for opening them to John Q. Public...

...But Henry had better act quickly, because the information he wants might not be around in a few months...

...On the EBB, I leafed through the Daily Treasury Statement, which provides up-to-date numbers on the U.S...

...The State Department recently condensed four publications-the Bulletin, Current Policy, Gist, and Update for State-into one: The Department of State Dispatch...

...This failure to preserve “unvaluable history” may be the most severe long-term consequence of privatization...

...The revenues EBB reaps from these modest chargesbetween $120,000 and $150,000 annually-more than cover the system’s operating and staffing costs...

...Information inflation The elitist franchising of government information is a strange byproduct-make that unintended consequenceof America’s computer revolution...

...playing the cut-rate reference librarian to every poor farmer in the country...

...A Nebraska bean farmer reckoning how much to plant this year could enjoy 50 hours of access to the USDA’s database for only $1,550...

...Under the agreement, the USDA simply gives the data, gratis, to Martin Marietta, which in turn sells it for $45 per hour, on top of a minimum fee of $150 per month...

...And there’s nothing to prevent a vendor from collecting this information, repackaging it, adding value to it, and reselling it...

...To realize how critical-and how economically possible-that is, you don’t have to be some luddite longing for the days of the fusty archive and the accordion file...

...the rest were commodity cowboys like E.F...

...I’d tell you who they are if I could afford to: NTIS charges $185 for the list...

...Not exactly...

...In fiscal year 1991, the federal government will spend $51.5 million to maintain the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system, the nation’s most comprehensive corporate disclosure database and one of the key sources of reliable information on a company’s assets, debt, stock, and longterm plans...

...To save money, increase efficiency, and stimulate the economy, it read, federal agencies should henceforth place “maximum feasible reliance on the private sector for . . . dissemination of products and services...

...Dispatch is now available on paper for a $75 annual subscription-more than three times the combined price of the four publications it replaced...

...it buys them the paper and ink to do it, thanks to a neat dovetail between that computer revolution and antigovernment Reaganism...

...Those high-priced vendors add value to public information in any number of ways, some of them arduous and beneficial...

...The Office of Management and Budget was charged with developing and implementing the broad project...

...Consider AGNET, a nonprofit group based at the University of Nebraska that until the mid-eighties received crop and livestock statistics, export sales reports, and other agricultural data from the U.S...

...Public access-and not private profit or costcuttingshould be the animating spirit behind any policy covering the dissemination of government data...

...Unlike AGNET, these f i i s can absorb the higher access rates by passing them on to clients...

...If Henry Kissinger wanted to find and retrieve a five-page article on the failed Soviet coup, it would set him back about 50 bucks...

...Because the SEC stores the EDGAR data in the raw form that most of its computers cannot read, the agency-that is, the taxpayers-will have to pay for access to its own data...

...The necessary data would have cost Orman $20,000...

...Gregory Orman, a recent graduate of Princeton, was a non-hypothetical undergraduate student who needed a decade’s worth of Federal Reserve Board data to research his honor’s thesis...

...and on weekends, with no extra charges for retrieval...

...And it could continue by placing on-line some of the most essential government publications, many of which are already digitalized...

...At its most basic level, public information is an organic byproduct of the government’s daily functions...

...Nor do you have to go to Canada or Sweden or some other high-tech, high-humanity Valhalla...

...You pick up the phone and dial the weather, just as you’ve done for years...

...It cost me $24 for one soybean price...

...She’s all alone in the tub,” coos an alluring voice...

...And while the free market has little interest in meeting that obligation to consumers, modem technology ensures that the government can -if it wants to...

...And the vendors see no danger if the government has a monopoly over obscure or unmarketable information...

...Using basic communications software on a basic personal computer, I was able to dial up Commerce’s Economic Bulletin Board (EBB) and browse through files for 20 minutes free of charge...

...Lost in State These were good tidings for the multi-billion dollar information industry, which boomed in the eighties...

...But while the government can store data in these configurations, most ordinary personal and business computers can’t read it...

...In so doing, they “add value” to public information and gain the right to copyright the final “product” and charge high prices for its use...

...Again,nothing terribly complex...

...James Love, director of the Taxpayers Assets Project, a Nader organization, complains, “A high school student could write the software...

...Those figures were essential and affordable to AGNET’s subscribersfarmers and researchers who paid a $50 annual fee and $30 per hour for computer time...

...In short, the government doesn’t just hand companies a license to print money...

...That’s not a free market for information-just a fair one...

...Fair distribution of information should be available at low cost to consumers and the government...

...companies would then have to truly add value, not just sell back to us what we built with our own funds...

...The recorded message continues: For $19.95, you can spend three minutes on the phone with a luscious, well-jacuzzied woman...

...As seen, though, many IIA members profit greatly from their virtual monopolies on public information...

...In many areas of the South, where the Yet why should the government spend bushels starts in Seattle to the health hazards posed by pesticides to the number of Detroit children who live in poverty...

...The first generation of Window products should include the Federal Register, Congressional Record, National Trade Data Bank, FEC campaign contributions, and U.S...

...But while America’s 1,300 National Depository Libraries-public reading rooms for government documents-receive the CD-ROMs free of charge, most lack the hardware required to read them...

...Charles Rose has introduced legislation that would replicate the EBB on a broader scale...

...It gives the Government Printing Office an affirmative responsibility to disseminate electronic information,” says James Love of the Taxpayers Assets Project...

...CIDS users must pay a minimum of $75 per month, an hourly rate, plus a charge of 2 cents per line for retrieving data...

...democracy, unique among the community of nations,” gushes Allen in one leaflet...

...This talk of “marketplace value” underscores the fundamental flaw in the privatizers’ logic...

...For example: *The National Trade Data Bank (NTDB), which synthesizes decades’ worth of information on international economics and export opportunities, is sold in bulk on CD-ROMs for only $35...

...Public information is a national resource, not a commodity...

...In February, the Computer Information Delivery Services (CIDS), which is owned by Martin Marietta and disseminates information for several federal agencies, began to carry Dispatch, as well as transcripts of daily press briefings, travel advisories, and James Baker’s speeches, testimony, and press conferences...

...It knows who its real client is-big business...

...If the notion of the Window is not as sexy as a sultry-voiced woman in a hot tub, its pleasures would be a lot less fleeting: the promotion and preservation of information that lets ordinary American farmers, students, journalists, and other citizens see the same statistical world as the American elite...

...Even government-learning precisely the wrong lesson from privatization-is now willing to gouge the public for what that public pays to collect...

...Thereafter, the service costs $12 per hour during business hours, and $3 per hour after 6 p.m...

...Only a lack of political imagination stands in the way...

...And it doesn’t have to...

...A Freedom of Information Act request filed on Orman’s behalf was denied on the grounds that he could have simply purchased the information...

...I took some government information, combined it with other information, and added value to it by putting it into a reasonably readable form...

...In fact, Plesser, a former Nader Raider, is getting a little tired of hearing about “every hypothetical graduate student needing some numbers...

...In the Trade Opportunities file, I learned that Qatar’s Department of Ports is seeking a U.S...

...Under this new regime, federal agencies would continue to do the heavy lifting-i.e., gathering, storing, and processing data-at taxpayer expense, and then would make their loads available to private industry at bargain prices, or no price at all...

...In the case of the agricultural database, Marietta simply takes data that the government has already organized and categorized and places it into an on-line format that its clients can use-a pretty simple computer task...

...But how hot, exactly...

...Today, most information vendors’ mark-ups bear little relation to the amount of effort, investment, or imagination the company adds-in large part because many have a virtual monopoly on that information and a captive corporate audience...

...What private vendors do is mold the raw data into a form that their customers can use...

...Under this system, 50 hours of computer time costs two and one half times what it used to...

...Rep...

...In 1980, Congress passed the Paperwork Reduction Act, which directed agencies to cut costs wherever possible by using advanced electronic technology to collect, maintain, and disseminate information...

...Of course, most of the database’s current subscribers can afford the higher prices-because most of them aren’t public-minded nonprofit groups...

...Unfortunately, you’re still paying to use other government data-as a taxpayer...

...Has the federal government’s weather service gone softcore...

...Info-glomerates like Mead, Dow Jones News Retrieval, and Knight-Ridder reap a significant percentage of their profits by gouging the public for access to the fruits of government labor...

...But thanks in large part to a powerful information lobby on Capitol Hill and the complicity of the Reagan-Bush administrations, government has been content to let the free market serve the few at the expense of the many...

...Marietta translates the SEC data into machine-readable form, which it then copyrights...

...by West Publishingthe version many lawyers find worth the cost...

...But users pay dearly for the value added to the information: $80 per hour, plus 54 cents for each individual statistic retrieved...

...As of 1989, Martin Marietta’s database had only 34 regular non-governmental users...

...In other words, the government should disseminate its information only when vendors cannot turn a profit by doing it...

...Government exists, in part, to produce information...

...And preservation...

...Last year, the firm reaped nearly $440 million-taking home $34 million in pure profit...

...The GPO could easily jumpstart this project simply by consolidating the dozens of free-standing government databases that are already accessible through remote personal computers...

...The government sucks in an unfathomable amount of information...

...Joe Sophomore should be so lucky: Because vendors have nowhere else to go for the information, that one program might reap tens of millions of dollars in profits...

...Curing the terminal illness The EBB is a wonderful example of how advanced technology can make useful information available to large numbers of people at reasonable costs...

...adds value to NTDB data simply by translating the information into an accessible on-line database...

...The “Paperless Agency” quickly became the new bureaucratic ideal...

...Cheap data It’s so self-evident it shouldn’t need saying: Instead of helping major corporations at the expense of economics majors, a good government ensures that public information is equally accessible...

...An investigator who calls up 10 corporate reports in an hour on Disclosure will have to shell out $245...

...Orman’s case highlights the dangerous implications of the eighties’ attitude toward public information...

...Once up and running, the Window would pay for itself through user fees-just like the EBB does...

...Similarly, in its LEXIS database, Mead Data Central collects and indexes disparate bodies of case law and places them on an on-line database that also contains academic legal writings...

...Other info-vendors place bulk information into files in a pre-existing computer database...

...Until 1985, academics could obtain the tapes free of charge...

...IIA officials regularly testify at congressional hearings and work with state and local policymakers to encourage the passage of favorable legislation...

...But since AGNET’s farmbelt customers couldn’t afford the steeper charges for the use of the USDA’s information, the network dropped the service altogether...

...The Window is an ambitious, even subversive, project, for it pushes the responsibility for disseminating information squarely back onto the broad shoulders of the federal government...